“And don’t think you’re getting the family discount this time. Not in that fancy new uniform you’ve got there. Everyone saw Lilia dragging you in. Can’t have the others thinking I’ve gone corporate on them,” she warned.
“Of course, of course,” Kalus laughed, “You can hold me up by my collar outside if that helps. Maybe give me a shiner for the road.” Demi glanced from Kalus to Camilla, unable to tell if the invisible force between them was actually spite or some warped form of love.
“You’ll…see the credits come through before the end of the day. Full service price,” he assured the owner of the clinic when he saw an opening.
“Mhm,” Camilla grumbled, hardly glancing at the Captain. Instead, she watched Kalus and Lilia head for the door. “Pain in my ass,” she murmured as he stepped through.
“Oh, please,” Kalus called back over his shoulder, “This isn’t even the worst shape I’ve shown up in.”
“Thank you, Camilla,” Lilia smiled, just before they left.
“Of course, honey,” Camilla finally cracked a smile. The door closed her inside, alone with her worry for two of the scrappiest kids she’d seen make it through the other side of Saturn’s mines. The first she’d ever seen leave, and come back in uniform.
“Arms Master Kalus Delphi,” Howard greeted with a warm nod, just outside Camilla’s Discount Clinic.
“Howard. You really came through back there, with that crazy sound, whatever it was,” Kalus told him. He clasped Howard’s shoulder. “You know, you don’t have to… You know what? What was that sound?”
“A frequency of noise that causes Chrysum to vibrate rapidly. It’s extremely painful for Dragons, whose blood has a high Chrysum content,” Howard explained. Kalus nodded and, much to his sister and Captain’s dismay, said no more.
“He lives,” Sophia actually almost smiled when she saw Kalus.
“Don’t get too soft on me,” Kalus warned her, almost smiling himself. Then he remembered to whom he spoke and shifted tones immediately. “Heard you trashed the mission, along with the SkyLine Launcher.”
“Saving your skinny ass,” Sophia sneered back.
“Please,” Demi roared over the growing commotion before it spiraled too far beyond reigning in. “Lilia. You mentioned you knew a place we could get the parts we need?”
“I do…but it’s not a place I’d bring all of you. They’ll take one look at the five of us in uniform and spit in our faces,” Lilia told the Captain. Kalus nodded in unconscious agreement. He’d met his sister’s fellow scrappers only a handful of times. None of them had been particularly pleasant.
“Where should we go, then?” Sophia frowned.
“We could take them as far as the Gourdstock,” Kalus suggested, “Doesn’t make sense to leave them all the way out here.”
“Alright,” Lilia agreed, “Who’s up for a little tour?”
“It’s been some number of years since I’ve been to Saturn. I’d enjoy one,” Howard raised his hand, like a child in a classroom.
“A-alright!” Lilia spun to lead the group off down a concrete walkway almost like a sidewalk. What it was on the side of, however, was different from almost any other place she could think of. “Kal… Why don’t you do it? You were always better at explaining it all than me.” Kalus stretched his arms out, knuckles interlocked to crack each one.
“A good old fashioned tour, eh?” he considered, “Haven’t given one of those since…” the slightest hint of a smile played with a hint of something quite different on his lips. Since I needed tips bad enough to force them on new arrivals. More than once, a newbie WCC sentry had opted to put Kalus in Camilla’s care instead of taking him up on his tours. “Anyway. Welcome to Saturn, folks!” he snapped himself out of it. “Currently, we’re in Ring 5.”
From what the other Dogs could see of Ring 5, it was a long, open hallway of dull gray rock. It curved up at the very edge of what they could see. Their concrete walkway divided two starkly different environments. On the right were endless wall-to-wall storefronts as far as they could see. Yellow light cones lit the signs of drugstores, grocery marts and outfitters. On the left, patchwork garden beds of flowers, grasses and vegetables were trenched in gravelly soil between the sidewalk and endless windows. The steel networks of Saturn’s other rings passed by on the other side of them.
“There are six man-made Rings in the actual ice rings around Saturn. They bridge the gaps between the biggest ice chunks, running tunnels through them where most of the people born here make their living mining Chrysum. When Lilia and I were born, there were only two. They’re numbered 1 through 6 with the lowest being the closest to Saturn and so on. The newer three are a recent development.” Kalus explained.
“Are they all…like this?” Sophia asked in the pause of a breath.
“Not nearly. Ring 5 is one of the newest. It’s partially residential, partially mining. It’s built into ice and rock rife with Chrysum. The plants are to chase away the crazies and reduce transport costs for food. The older ones are mostly steel corridors and stations for mining pods,” Kalus told her.
“There really isn’t any effort to colonize the surface of the planet,” Sophia said after another few seconds of pacing in the lamplight. Kalus followed her eyes to the passing windows.
“Excellent observation. Next time, raise your hand or lose a sticker,” he warned her. Sophia struck back with a sour look but managed to withhold her tongue. “There isn’t any effort to settle the surface. Unlike Jupiter, which has a layer that shifts between gas and liquid, Saturn’s all gas as best we can tell. There’s no suspicion of solid land, and there’s no Chrysum. It’s more likely we’ll see the number of man-made Rings double before any effort is made to really dig deep into the surface.” Sophia knew this, of course, but she’d be damned if she was going to lose any more stickers at the hands of Kalus.
By the end of his response, Lilia had reached a fork in the path. She made a hard right into an enclosed stairwell, while the rest of Ring 5 continued round, all the way back to Camilla’s. The rest o
f the Dogs followed her in a pattern that felt and looked like “down” to them, but really was just moving closer to Saturn. Each of them had their own marvel at the wonders of artificial gravity, even the ones who grew up here, on their way around five stories of stairs. That brought them to the fork for the next Ring. Lilia, however, passed Ring 4 right by and continued on the stairs.
“The outermost Ring, 6, used to be a free-floating WCC barracks. It was attached to the rest recently in an effort to have the communities…better protected from dastardly scrappers,” Kalus was sure to deepen his voice just for his sister. She snorted to herself as she led on. “Rings 1, 2 and 3 are where most of the work gets done. They stretch through the ice and rock fields richest in Chrysum. Now…it used to be that all the collecting was done with mining pods, and the actual man-made Rings were just for storing and transporting the haul. But now…” Kalus trailed off to observe the latest trend in Saturn’s Chrysum mining for himself, through tall vertical windows.